This is an update to the earlier post on my experiences with getting my XBOX 360 US version work in India, it was basically how I got a 220V Power Adaptor for XBOX 360 in India.

There are two options to get a 220V (India) Power Adaptor for your XBOX 360:

1. The XBOX 360 220V Adaptor I was using stopped working, may be because of the frequent voltage fluctuations in Chennai for last few months. Hence I went back to Ritchie Street and bought a new one. This time I made it a point to note down the shop name for benefit of others (and may be for myself again) as this was most asked in the comments I received for the earlier post. I purchased a new XBOX 360 220V Power Adaptor (without warranty) for Rs.2500 + VAT from "Shah Trading Co.", 15, Narasingapuram Street, Off. Mount Road, Chennai - 600002; Phone: 044-2841 5874.
2. After this, I contacted Microsoft Support in India and asked whether they have a solution now?. Surprisingly this time around, they right away offered a solution. They asked me to go a near by service center in Chennai and drop the original 110V (USA) power adaptor. Within 20-30 days of doing this, I received a replacement of a new 220V power adaptor absolutely free. Great service by Microsoft, keep it up. You can contact  Microsoft support in India at toll-free 1800 102 1100 and select Option 7 for XBOX support. Please keep your XBOX 360 Serial number, original purchase invoice handy with you when you call and request them for a replacement to make your XBOX 360 US version to work in India. Considering that officially XBOX 360 support is available only in the region you bought I was lucky to get this replacement in India. I feel this replacement offer is a nice gesture by Microsoft and note that it is available only for original XBOX 360 accessories (not third-parties made).

Few weeks back I decided to repave my Laptop (Macbook Air) and go with Windows 7 Build 7000 (yes I know in few weeks we will have RC ). After fixing few issues with drivers and boot camp, I am overall happy. Occasionally Windows doesn't shut-down gracefully, when it happens you got to force switch-off (which in MBA means holding the power off button for few seconds till you hear a POP sound).

The basic installation of the OS (Windows 7) is similar to doing it for Vista using Boot Camp. You start with Apple Boot Camp CD 1 and proceed from there. My installation was dual-boot configuration - having both Mac OS and Windows 7. Once Windows is installed , you continue with the devices installation which can be a little tricky. Below are few issues I faced before I could get everything working fine.

1. In Mac OS, you can select one of the OS to boot into after a restart. Unfortunately Mac OS didn't show the Windows 7 installation. Nothing to sweat. When you switch ON your machine you need to keep holding Alt (option) key till you the see the boot options. Here you can select Windows 7.
2. In Windows 7, initially for some reasons Boot Camp icon didn't show up in System tray. I had to run it from C:\Program Files\Boot Camp\kbdmgr.exe. I found it useful to update all Apple software then it seems to have got fixed.
3. Audio (Sound card) didn't get its driver installed correctly. MBA has a Realtek HD Audio, so I went to Realtek site and downloaded the latest Vista driver (R 2.22) from here or here. The site is designed a little counter-intuitive so be patient.
4. If some devices like in-built Camera didn't get installed correctly, go to device manager, update driver and point to the BootCamp CD.
5. I have a HP Photosmart C6288 Printer (part of HP Photosmart C6100 series). The default setup from HP will fail to install as it couldn't find either Windows XP or Vista. To fix this, right-click on the setup program (AIO_CDA_Full_Network_enu.exe). Then use the "Troubleshoot Compatibility" option or select properties and the compatibility tab:
1. Set the compatibility mode to Windows Vista
2. Set the privilege level to "Run this program as an administrator"
6. I have a Tata Indicom Plug2Surf USB data card. To install this, first time when you run the setup, Run it as Administrator. Even then when you run the application it will not detect the modem. You will need to ignore the application and create yourself (manually) a dial-up network connection. Customize and follow the instructions from this blog post (which talks for Huawei card though), skip the portions specific to Huawei, but it gives the correct username/password phone number to dial, etc.
7. For PDF creation, I was using CutePDF which doesn't work with Windows 7, so I went with PrimoPDF (free).
8. For Antivirus, I went with my good friend Kesavan's - K7 Computing Antivirus which works fine in Windows 7.

You should be all set by now, as for me (as seen below) all the devices are working fine. Eagerly waiting for Windows 7 RC.

One of the strengths of iPhone is the now famous iTunes store, which helps you buy applications/music/movies/TV shows seamlessly. Lot of companies have tried the concept (which is not new) as old as 10-15 years back, for example Microsoft has tried it multiple times (Zune, Windows Player) in the past. The winning difference has been the flawless execution and the simplicity that Apple has delivered. Apple has managed to satisfy both ends  - with their clout they got the big media companies to sign uniform pricing's and they also made it easy to get the casual developer on-board. The formula from Apple was simple - you make the application, we manage the hosting, delivery, installation, payment gateways, legal/taxation, etc. The developer gets 70%, Apple gets 30% - a neat deal for both parties. And Apple's new iPhone OS3 is pushing the envelope much further - check out this cool preview of iPhone OS 3 or here in YouTube.

Few months after my purchase of my iPhone, I searched for some applications. I found thousands of applications in their store, but I was looking for something that will be useful for me and not clutter my phone. A phone for me primarily is for Voice, SMS, Camera, email & web browsing (in that order of priority). I was not sure on the number of applications that will be available for India - as so far many of the American companies have avoided dealing with copyright/licensing/taxation trouble for India market. They feel the trouble is not worth for the size of the Indian market for these (how wrong they are). Traditionally Indian mobile users have not followed the global trend (and other advanced Asian markets like Korea and Japan) in purchase of applications, games, music & movies, but that I think is due to content for their taste not being available. Since iPhone store is one of the biggest USP's of iPhone and buying apps is not popular in India is probably a reason for iPhone being sold only 20,000 units in India since its launch. 

In iPhone store I found a plethora of apps to be bought for India, there was no shortage - I have tried few iPhone apps and the shopping experience from the phone was seamless. No punching of credit cards (you do that when you create your iTunes account in the web) and no multiple confirmations/redirections/instructions. You click on buy, then install and you are done.

The apps I use regularly are two (both free)- TwitterFon and Skype (recently released). I also bought a Tetris game for $4.99. Regarding the apps, I found TwitterFon to be very convenient to use, I am finding myself twittering more when I am outside the office - waiting for something in a queue or participating like y'day in a boring session for CIOs by IBM India. About Skype for iPhone it is great to note that in India it works over both Wi-Fi and 2G connections. The quality of Skype calls using iPhone is great and the convenience of speaking with a mobile phone anyday for me is better than a headset or holding a USB Skype phone.

In last month TED conference, Pattie Maes' from MIT & Pranav Mistry demonstrated a wearable device.  It's a wearable device with a projector paves the way for interaction with our environment. The device which they call "Sixth Sense" enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data. A very exciting idea which opens up boundless possibilities if lives up to its claim.

One of the uses of this device they show is a live video (latest on the relevant headlines) being projected in the newspaper in your hands. When I saw this, I was reminded of a old Tamil movie - Pattanathil Bhootham (released in 1967). In the movie there is a scene where the "Genie" shows (then) latest movie songs on top of the movie's advertisements that is in the newspaper.

What was a dream and thought super-natural 40 years ago is now a reality. Exciting to look forward to the reality of the coming decades.

Video links:

1.The clip from Pattanathil Bhootham (பட்டணத்தில் பூதம்) Tamil Movie released in 1967, showing the idea of videos being projected on a newspaper

2.Full movie Pattanathil Bhootham (பட்டணத்தில் பூதம்), free and legal from Rajshri.com

3.Sixth Sense demo by Pranav Mistry (forward to the minute 6:30 for the newspaper demo)

Part 1

If you are like me who grew up in 1980s, you will no-doubt have a huge collection of old Audio cassettes (Tapes) that contains your childhood favourties but now lying somewhere collecting dust. Today you should be lucky to be having a cassette player in working condition to play them. A decade back I started hunting for my favourite albums/movies and managed to buy most of them as Audio CDs or MP3 CDs, but I still long for digitising my old tapes so that I can listen to them where-ever I want. So few years back I bought an inexpensive cassette player which has a stereo speaker out (1/8" TRS Jack in USA or 3.5mm miniature EP Jack in India, which is the standard type used in your iPod, Computer speakers) . To record involved four steps:

1. I connected the Speaker-out from the player to Line-In in my PC using a standard 3.5mm Stereo Audio Patch cable like the one shown below. The audio quality depends on the quality of the cable and the pins used, so buy the best looking one or a branded one that you can find in your local electronics store.
    
2. Recording quality turned to be good, but to set the correct volume level in the player and Mic-level in PC was tricky. That part took me few hours to set it right, too high the volume in player then you can listen to the audio in your PC speakers but nothing gets recorded and too low the recorded song can't be heard while played back.
3. Setup Line-In as default "Recording Device" in Windows. This can be done in Windows Vista by Right-Clicking on the Speaker system tray icon (bottom-right before time) and selecting "Recording Devices". Then in the dialog (as shown below) that appears Right-Click and select "Set as Default Device". You might want to double-click on the Line-in Icon and adjust the audio-levels for fine-tuning. If everything is working well, then when you play something in your player you will see the bars on right-hand side of the Line-In row moving up and down.
    
4. The software used to record took some experimentation as well but was easier. I settled down with using the free Windows Media Encoder to record the songs as WMA files and then converting songs that I needed in my iPhone alone to MP3 files using Nero WaveEditor. I was not comfortable with directly recording into Nero WaveEditor or the free Audacity equivalent. If you are using Windows Vista, you can also try the in-built Sound Recorder as well that now supports durations longer than 60 seconds but it doesn't offer the level adjustment controls found in Windows Media Encoder.

That's all it takes to record your tapes as WMA/MP3 files. You are now good to throw-away your cassettes.

Part 2

Part 2 of this story happened about six months back when during my trip to USA in June '08 I had purchased a device to make the conversion easier. The device was ION Audio's Tape2PC. I saw it online and ordered through Amazon for $130 or so.  The device claimed to make it easier for converting the tapes to MP3 using bundled software and the USB connection (so no cable hunting). I presumed the software does auto rewinding to beginning of cassette, identifying each track automatically and auto-reverse once one side of the tape is over, so that we don't need to baby-sit during the entire tape.

After I got back to India, I never found time (or the interest) to set up this device until last Sunday. That's when I unwrapped the box, connected the cables and without a moment's thought switched the Power-ON. I got the display lights for a second and the device went blank. That's when it stuck me that the device was 110V and I connected to 220V (in India), and the power supply inside the device should have got burned . Next day I gave the device to my local Electronic Repair shop (Rajam Electronics, Station Road, West Mambalam, Chennai -33. Phone: 044-2474 0106) to fix it. They diligently worked on it, fixed it and gave it to me today. They charged me Rs.400 (USD 8) towards their service charge and for replacing the 110V transformer to 220V and few other components that got burned. I brought the device home and plugged in, Windows Vista promptly deducted the device as a USD Audio CODEC and it worked just fine. The burning episode was a blessing in disguise, now I don't need to keep connecting every time a 220V-110V Step-Down adaptor.

The device turned out to be a slight-disappointment. The audio quality was great due to the USB interface, but the software functionality was limited. No Auto Track Identification, No Auto-Rewind, No Auto-Reverse - you need to baby sit throughout the cassette play time, no escape from that. The in-built software (EZ Tape Convertor) does make it easy to mark each tracks, tagging easier and moves automatically the completed tracks to iTunes. You can find a detailed product review of Tape2PC from UK's PCAdvisor here - I suggest you read it before you decide to buy this device. My opinion is that if you don't mind spending few minutes extra for each cassette and you don't have that many cassettes then you can safe yourself some money by not buying this. Instead go with my alternate method suggested in Part-1 of this post.

For little more than a year I was using HTC S710, as my usage of emails grew after my company moved to Exchange Server the phone was feeling to be too small & slow - it was time for a new phone for me. After waiting for few months (iPhone got released in India around Aug '08) and deciding between Sony Ericsson X1, Samsung Omnia & HTC Touch Pro, I went with the original and the popular Apple iPhone 3G. After the purchase of iPhone in Dec '08, and playing around with the phone for few minutes wiped away all my doubts about iPhone. It is the best Smartphone out there in market. It is going to take Symbian (OS that powers Nokia) & Windows Mobile (OS that powers HTC, Omnia and X1) few revisions before they can catch up with the ease of use and ergonomics of iPhone.

The purchase itself was different from other phone purchases I have made. I had to go to Vodafone store (no one else seems to be selling it) in T.Nagar (Chennai) and pay Rs.26,400 by credit card (only CC and Cash, no cheques - even though our company has over 30 post-paid connections with Vodafone), I had to read and sign a 7-page license agreement from Apple - promising that you will never download pirated content, you will indemnify Apple for any claims out of usage of iPhone and the likes. I learned that my exiting data plan with Vodafone will not work with iPhone, I had to opt for a different iPhone dataplan at Rs.499/699 per month (which will not work on other phones, so you need to have two plans at the same time if you want to use in different phones).  The phone's packaging was minimal. It seems the small pin (like a office paper clip) that you need to use to remove SIM card from the phone if lost will cost you Rs.500! . The sales guy informed me that the phone comes with warranty against any manufacturing defect, but if I happen to drop the phone and anything other an air-crack happens, it can't be repaired and I better throw the phone in the nearest trash can.

Regarding the features of the phone, enough has been talked by reporters around the world. I would like to highlight few of my experiences.

Highlights - Apart from the positives above, few other points impressed me the most and they are:

1. My company uses RADIUS certificates based authentication implemented at the Windows Server 2003 level for Wi-Fi security. Even on a Windows Mobile (better integration between Microsoft Products) you can't connect that easily to these Wi-Fi access points. With iPhone it was seamless. It automatically detected that I had this authentication method, prompted for my Domain Credentials, downloaded & installed the certificate. Everything worked flawlessly. More over with half-a-dozen Wi-Fi AP's that I have configured across my office, house, relative's houses where I frequent - the overall Wi-Fi experience has been outstanding. Even with-in my office just as I get out of Wi-Fi zone, it seamlessly moves to EDGE (Cellular network) and back.

2. The design idea of having a Toggle switch in the side for Silent mode - brilliant. Other than this and Volume Control (two buttons on side) everything else in iPhone is touch. It is not practical to access your phone through Touch when it is in your pocket and you want to turn it to Silent when you are in a meeting. And having it as a Toggle switch, you can easily feel / see whether your phone is in Silent or not. And you can configure when in Silent mode whether the phone should vibrate or not.

3. The Exchange Server integration through ActiveSync is outstanding. Next to having Outlook 2007 client this is the best client software for Exchange server - period!. It is so good that nowadays I hardly bring home my laptop to work on emails.

4. The firmware upgrade process through iTunes software is extremely easy. I have my reservations in general about iTunes software, but the updates to the phone through this has been implemented very well. Other OEM's should learn to mimic this.

5. The MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint & Adobe PDF viewers that are built-in are much usable. I could open the most complex Excel Sheets and Word documents that I received in the last few weeks at it and it opened all of them without any fuss. What is better is that the viewer supports the latest MS Office formats (Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007). 

Blank screen bug

I was wanting to do this post for over a month now, but it didn't make it. Today my phone had its first serious problem - suddenly the display and touch were not working entirely. I guess it was to do with a video I was downloading from YouTube with the built-in app. When it gets a call though it was ringing, I was not able to pickup the call. Any number of Power button presses, Home button presses didn't help. I started to feel worried that it had developed a hardware  problem and I had to give it to Vodafone/Apple for servicing. That's when I searched and found this page which had a solution to the same problem. The solution is to keep pressing both the Home and the Power ON button for 10 seconds and the device will do a reset.

Recently I was checking out one of Nokia's entry level phone (Rs.2000) - Nokia 2626. The phone had "Hindi" letters printed on the keyboard, so I was doubtful whether it will have Tamil fonts. I launched the built-in browser and went to INFITT website (HTML page in Unicode), it said loading and processing for over 2 minutes; but I was delighted finally to see the page display properly in Tamil (you can see the image in right).

This means that this entry level device has 1. Unicode support, 2. Tamil Unicode font, 3. Rendering support for Indic languages in particular to Tamil.  This proves the present Unicode system for Indic languages does work even on the most basic/low-end devices and processors. So the reason Tamil Unicode is not yet supported widely on all phones especially high-end Windows Mobile, iPhone, Blackberry & Nokia Smartphones is not because of any technical limitations, but a lack of interest from the manufacturers to ship Tamil (Indic) support. It is mostly got to do with the wrong assessment by them, that all Smartphone buyers in India can read and care only about "English" and not their mother tongue.

References: Hindi support in mobile devices in India.

Fedup with the local cable TV operator (which is a Monopoly in my area just like everywhere else in Chennai) few months back I switched the remaining 3 Television connections in my house to Sun Direct DTH. In my working den I have been having Tata Sky for more than a year as I like to watch STAR World and other English channels, and Tata Sky at time had good packages for that.

The offer of Rs.2999 for Set Top Box and One Year Free Tamil Channels from Sun Direct was ideal for the two televisions in the living room and my parents room - as they watch mostly Tamil Channels and some English News channels, that's all. Since I have a 5 year old son, for my bedroom I opted for the add-on package of "Pluto" that includes Pogo and Cartoon Network for Rs.27 per month. All was well for sometime. Recently one day, Pogo and CN stopped working and son started screaming. I called Sun Direct customer care after few minutes of verifications the person insisted I say whether I am a customer or a dealer  - though I introduced myself as "Venkatarangan" husband of "Lakshmi Venkatarangan" in whose name the connection is.  He explained that I have to renew my package (Pluto) to get this and to do this I have to disconnect, call again and this time get connected to their "Recharge" department. After doing that, it turned out to be that I have to renew the "Pluto" every month. Can you believe it?. I can't give a standing instruction that I need these channels/packages for every month. Even though I have balance of over Rs.200 in my account, Sun Direct would like you to speak to them every month and renew it. The customer care representative said please make a note that your package expires on 24th Feb 2009, so remember to call us near that time and renew again. As a customer it is our job to remember and call them - what a great service in this digital age.

After doing that I thought it will be easier doing this through their web site. It turns out this is the same way in the web site as well, and the web site works only with Internet Explorer. I learned this when I used Firefox to login and change the default password, it kept saying the password I gave didn't meet minimum length - it turns out their JavaScript/DOM access is scripted only with IE in mind.

So if you decide to purchase Sun Direct DTH, though there are no issues on the Broadcast quality, you will find their customer care and web site will test your patience from time to time - be prepared for that!. In Customer care, online and mobile access - Tata Sky is superior and miles ahead.

Little more than a year back I got my 64-bit desktop with Vista x64 and TV Tuner card connected to Tata Sky DTH in my office. Since the support for Pinnacle was not complete in Vista x64 I couldn't get it working with Windows Media Center and had to resort to Nero Home for watching TV programs. About a week back I downloaded the latest beta bits of Windows 7.0 and the installation went very well. Almost all the drivers installed correctly and the few that had problems could be corrected easily (details after few paragraphs below).

The Pinnacle USB PCTV 330e had an inbuilt driver in Windows 7 for x64 and Windows Media Center recognized it easily. After few trials of positioning the Infrared transmitter in front of Tata Sky set top box and few rounds of learnings of the Infrared code of Tata Sky remote control by Windows Media Center, everything was working fine. I was able to change channels from Keyboard/Mouse/Media Center remote and Tata Sky set top box responded correspondingly (there was a trick to set the remote code transmission speed to Medium, Tata Sky uses 3 digits numbers for Channels). You can see the successful recordings I made below. The Microsoft PlayReady Runtime and Electronic Program Guide (EPG) didn't work (may be because I was in India) and you need to skip them.

My machine is built on top of Asus Motherboard P5W64 WS Professional.  You get many of the latest drivers for x64 for this motherboard (P5W64 WS professional - Socket 775) from their support website itself. Few items in general I had problem:

1. HP Photosmart 6188 - The default HP driver refused to install in Windows 7. I right-clicked on the setup file and selected compatibility and set it to Windows Vista. Then it installed properly - seemed to be a simple bug in HP program for Windows OS version detection.
2. Marvell 88SE6145 SATA RAID Driver - The latest driver from Asus for Windows Vista x64 / Windows Server 2003 x64 solved this problem
3. PDF Conversion: I have been a long time user of CutePDF to convert documents to PDF effortlessly. How much ever I tried I couldn't get it installed in Windows 7.0, so I moved to Primo PDF - which was recommended by my IT Pro team, which got installed perfectly in Windows 7.
4. Antivirus – Our office uses Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition which didn’t get deployed in Windows 7, so I tried my good friend’s K7 Antivirus 7.0 from K7 Computing. This got installed and is working fine in Windows 7. 

One of the advantages of Direct To Home (Satellite / DTH ) TV is the promise of uninterrupted service and being free from cable cuts, etc. Unfortunately DTH too doesn't guarantee reception at all times as I realized today. In my house I have a Tata Sky DTH service in one room and Sun Direct DTH in another room.

It has been raining Cats & Dogs for the last two days in Chennai City due to Cyclone Nisha. There has been very little mobility within the city as most of the areas have been inundated. For me, I managed to return home in the evening now in my car with several feet of water in many places in T.Nagar, West Mambalam & Kodambakkam. After coming home I switched on TV wanting to catch what's happening with the horrific Mumbai Terror attacks in Taj & Trident Hotels. Due to heavy rains and the thick clouds in the sky above Chennai, both Tata Sky and Sun Direct had reception problems - both at various times kept breaking due to no signal. Though both services kept breaking, Sun Direct seems to be the most affected - even when it got signal, the pictures kept getting corrupted and the set-top box rebooting often. Though on normal days there was little problem with either of the services.

Necessity is the mother of invention they say. How true is this statement!. When you thought the Music Industry is doomed because of piracy from free MP3 downloads, someone out there comes with a new model. 

In the above chart from Economist you can see that the falling sales of physical (Audio CD) media is not being compensated by the rise in Digital sales. The Digital sales comes predominantly from iTunes (and other similar pay per download services) and from subscription services (like Rhapsody) which offer a flat fee per month for unlimited songs. Both the models have produced mixed results and are expected to continue with no clear winner as the choice depends on individual preferences. One clear trend that emerged in the last one year was the death of "DRM" with Apple leading the way and Amazon following it. As Nicholas Negroponte wrote in his classic book "Being Digital", you can never categorize an individual "bit" (Binary 1 or 0) to be of a particular character (Porn, Politics, News, Sports and so on), so policing the Internet for Piracy can never be fool-proof. I believe policing is certainly not the fix for increasing music revenues, instead a new business model that ensures ubiquitous DRM free music to listeners world over and fair-price/compensation to content producers will assure more success. World over many models are being experimented including Ad funding - which I feel will be of limited success, will not be a failure but also not a block-buster. In this connection, a new business model tried out by Nokia in its "Comes with Music" (CWM) looks very promising. 

CWM simply reverses the economics of Music Industry. Instead of paying for each song or track, your music cost is loaded on to the listening device. You buy the Nokia handset for around $230 and you get unlimited songs for one year, after which you can buy a subscription or buy a new device. Of course, Nokia wants you to buy a new device every year and that's the attraction for them to try this model. This bundling of content cost on to the device is in a way similar to TV License fee in UK, where a tax that is collected to watch TV in UK helps government to subsidize BBC content production costs. This is the reason why many of the content in BBC websites are restricted by IP to permit UK viewers only. 

For me, I hope someone in India (may be Reliance Big or Hungama or Airtel or Times) brings out this model for India. Unfortunately, till date there is no comprehensive subscription based sites in India offering Indian Film and Classical music. You are left with buying physical media then ripping it yourself (which is what I do) or paying blatantly expensive price for each track to legal sites or simply pirate.

I came across an advertisement about a product that can charge your mobile on your bicycle during a 15 minutes travel. I thought it was a cool innovative idea that will serve well the millions of rural people in India and China. I was disappointed when I visited the company's website as it carried no information about the product. Doing a web search revealed this was a concept showcased by Motorola in January 2007 itself. Anyways this is definitely an useful innovation for millions.

And if you are DIY type, doing this should not be very difficult or expensive. It can be done with an ordinary cycle-light dynamo and some circuitry to match and stabilize the output voltage.

I have been using as my primary laptop a Macbook Air running (obviously) Windows Vista for last six months. Everything is great with the laptop - the lightweight and the very cool design. There are only three things I don't like in this laptop: No right mouse button, Only one USB port, Problem with Wake up after sleep. The first two I can't do anything about, but the last one I can try to fix by a driver update. A check in Apple site didn't show up any updates for Bootcamp for Vista. Then looking into Device Manager I realized the graphics card in Macbook Air is Intel Mobile 965 Express, so going to Intel support site I downloaded the latest update: Mobile Intel® 965 Express Chipset Family Ver.# 15.11.3.1576 Date: Oct 11, 2008 for Windows Vista 32

Installing this, solved my wake up problems. If you have a Macbook Air, running Windows Vista and having problems with the machine coming up after sleep, I highly recommend this upgrade.

Today I got a chance to visit Cray Inc. (The supercomputer company) headquarters in downtown Seattle. I got to see in their lab the recently arrived Cray CX1 Supercomputer. This is the first product to be made after the partnership between Cray, Intel and Microsoft to bring the benefits of High Performance computing to desktops. This is a cool (with Cray's patented cooling systems and low decibel noise) computer that you can put it under your desk (or as a Cray engineer said on top of the desk to show the world you have a Cray machine) and run demanding applications without a datacenter.

The machine sports state of the art specifications of Up to Eight Blades per Chassis and in each chassis - Single or Dual Intel Quad-Core Xeons (overall upto 16 Quad Core Xeons), 64GB per Blade (or Node) and so on.

The basic chassis costs about $8000 and an average configuration including few compute, storage and graphics nodes costs between $25,000 to $60,000. Not that expensive for owning a supercomputer. The part I love is that it runs Windows HPC 2008 and the front-display panel sports a Windows CE for showing the status.

I wish I can get one of our media customers to pay for this and then we can deploy their web servers onto this!

Few months when the Petrol/Diesel shortage happened in India I decided I will buy an electric two-wheeler. Apart from the advantage of driving when Oil is scarce, I thought it will also give a personal satisfaction of being environment friendly. Of course, nothing is more "Green" than a bi-cycle. So about a month and half back I purchased the Ultra Velociti - an electric powered scooter. It runs only on Electricity with no Oil at all, the dealer claims there is nothing to maintain or service in the vehicle other than periodic Tyre Air-Pressure and Battery check.

Specifications of the scooter (* Under Standard Test conditions and a payload of 75 Kg):

• Speed    45 Km/ Hour*
• Range    50 Km/ Charge* (Each full charge takes about 6 hours)
• Vehicle weight    88 Kg

The only dealer I could find in Chennai when I searched was GEE GEE Motors in Royapuram, but they were willing to come down and give a test drive in my office. The scooter on road including Road Tax, Registration & Insurance costs about Rs.41,000/-. After paying the full money I had to wait for nearly 2 weeks before I got the vehicle complete with registration and Number - I don't like to drive vehicles without number and insurance.

Having been driving only a car for last several years, when this scooter arrived it was a experience of "Freedom" for me. I was able to go for local shopping in crowded market streets in West Mambalam & T.Nagar easily, without having to worry about parking and traffic. When I am driving this scooter and see the vehicles next to me I feel good that I am not polluting and I am spending negligible money for driving. Though the manual says maximum load is 120Kgs, I was able to ride it myself with my wife and kid comfortably - obviously a bit slower than riding it alone, but nevertheless you can. The one problem I faced was of charge, the power meter is unreliable - from full, once it drops to half it takes only few minutes to drop to zero. While it is in this region, it runs in kind of a stop-n-go motion. But this was because I didn't charge for over a week (though I didn't drive more than few kilometres as well), but it will be a wise idea to charge it every few days once - to avoid this problem.

 
(You can see the charger in the left picture, the other end can be plugged to any 5V socket; The Power-meter and Speedometer in the picture on right)

Overall I found it to be a great second vehicle. Can it be the only one?, I doubt. I feel the technology, power of the motor and the engineering have to undergo one or two more iterations before the first time two-wheeler purchaser can go for this, selecting this over a motorbike. 

Reference: GEE GEE MOTORS, 73, Mannarsamy Koil Street, Royapuram, Chennai.Phone: 044-43528008, 43528009

For nearly two decades now we haven't seen any innovation in design from makers of Wintel PCs or laptops. Over the last few years it has been solely Apple that was coming out with cool designs - whether it was Mac Mini or Macbook Air. So I was happy to see finally a PC manufacturer investing on design. I am talking here about the new Dell Hybrid desktops. Check them out they don't seem to have compromised on the technical specifications either which seems to include everything you may want in an average desktop PC - Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, Vista OS, 320GB HDD, DVD Writer, 5 USB, IEEE 1394, Ethernet, Wi-Fi and more. What is very cool is the availability of a Eco-Friendly Bamboo casing.

I wish this is just a beginning of design innovation coming from all the competitors in the Wintel PC world (Dell, Lenovo and HP) and we will see some new form factors in laptops as well.

I had written earlier about Microsoft Surface, but today I got a chance to play with it in person for sometime. I am in Redmond, WA this week and was visiting one of the Microsoft offices where they had kept a Surface computer for demo. Surface is one cool technology that you got to use for getting a good feel. It definitely has great potential of changing the way we interact with computers.

For years, I seem to have a love and hate experience with HP Printers especially with the accompanying software. With the centralized laser printers in my office things are normally OK, you give a print command it prints. The issues are only with the All In One Printers - should we be calling them super smart printers?.

I use dedicated HP All-In-One Printers (Photosmart 7288 and 6188) at my work and at my home. While I love the HP software for scanning, I am at loss on few other things.

• Why does the installation need to take so much for installing a simple scanner and printer software?.
• Every time I turn on the PC why should the HP software keep checking for updates - is scanner and printer so cutting edge that you need daily updates for new technologies?
• In Vista with UAC turned on, every time when it checks for updates it pops up the UAC elevated privileges dialog for the HPUpdate.exe program. My wife is always at loss on why this comes every time she logs in?.
• Frequently the HP software looses the networked printer. It says "No supported device can be found". May be it is users' fault or some configuration changes that was done. The way to resolve it is to get your installation media (or downloaded driver file) and run the installation again. In the installation dialog you see "Add a device" option (see the image on right). When the application can't find a device why can't application (Solution Center or Photosmart essential) itself display an option to search for a network printer and add it instead of requiring a rerun of the installation. It is not available today.
• When I rerun the installation today for this problem it displays the dialog shown below. I was puzzled for few minutes. Then pressing "OK" made it run fine. Why can't the software first check whether the necessary files are found in the path (that it anyway seems to detect) then if the files are not found display this dialog.

• The last item I have is on Paper Jams. When a paper jam happens, the printer says clear the jam and press "OK". But I am at loss on how to clear the paper jam - there is absolutely no instruction, and the space in the paper tray is so small that you can't insert your fingers and pull the paper out. 

Recently I bought a XBOX 360 from USA to be used a Media Extender. The AC Adapter was 110V and surprisingly unlike your laptop/mobile chargers this doesn't support multiple voltages. So to connect the XBOX in India I needed a new AC Adapter that works in 220V. I checked in my other XBOX 360 that was purchased in India and that had a 220V rating and Amazon US Store carried the 110V as an item to buy from Microsoft. So I assumed I can buy the AC Adapter locally, but bad luck. No shop (brick 'n' mortar or online) carried the AC Adapter alone separately in India. They redirected me to XBOX service centres, who said only on production of the faulty one they will give me a new one.  I wrote to XBOX 360 support, surprisingly I got a reply from them the next business day. I asked for a new 220V AC Adapter, they replied that XBOX 360 bought in USA won't work in India due to voltage and DVD Region differences. I said clearly I understand that and I take the ownership, but they kept insisting that they don't support voltage convertors (which I never wanted) and they don't support using USA XBOX 360 in India.

We have received your email and as I understand, you would like to know if there is an available power converter that can be used with your Xbox 360 console bought from the United States (110V). I apologize for the inconvenience.

Venkat, I regret to inform you that Microsoft and Xbox do not have a first-party power converter for the console's power supply. Although there may be third-party power converter sold that might be able to address the issue, we cannot guarantee the performance of the said items.  Furthermore, use of third-party or unapproved accessories with your console may cause performance issues which would void the warranty of your Xbox 360 console. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you.

Thank you for your time and understanding.

Finally before giving up, I went to Chennai's Electronic Heaven "Ritchie Street" which is a miniature version of Delhi's Nehru Place/Lajphat Rai market or Tokyo's Akihabara. There I found a new XBOX 360 220V AC Adapter for Rs.1600. This was without any warranty, but when connected worked beautifully and my problem was solved (fingers crossed). This was much better than having a separate 220V to 110V convertor, as this was a native AC to XBOX DC Voltage conversion.

Update on 8/June/2009: Check my follow up post where I have given the address of the shop in Chennai and how you may get a free replacement from Microsoft. 

I never thought I will buy an Apple Mac as my primary PC (laptop) but I did just that today. After nearly a month of thinking, I finally bought a Macbook Air to replace my aging Sony Vaio TX57GN laptop. The machine looks irresistibly beautiful.

I bought it from the Apple Store in Bellevue Square, the whole experience was smooth. A floor person did the entire transaction from his handheld (it looked like it ran Windows CE) including Credit Card charging, signature capture. Since I have been to Apple online before, he told they had my email Id and will send me an email receipt and not waste paper by printing it. WOW that was impressive.

Now look at the cool bag (below) they gave to carry all the stuffs that I bought including the Air and its accessories.

And look at the sleek boxes (below). Simple, clean and efficient - I could open all of them with my bare hands and never needed a scissor.

I then wanted to do the envelope test with both the Macbook Air and my Sony Vaio, both passed it well. Sony Vaio going in with room to spare on the width but less impressive than the Macbook when it comes to thickness.

I started used it for 5 minutes now - will keep you posted on how it goes. One thing is sure I will install Windows Vista in this in few days

Update: After I started using it I found that the "Delete" key was stuck and not functioning properly. I visited the Apple Store at Bellevue Square, WA again and I was scheduled a time slot in the evening 4PM to meet a "Genius". The sales person simply refused to even see the machine, their argument being once sold we got to contact Apple Service over phone (or) schedule an appointment with Genius. So going for the 3rd time to the Apple store I went to the "Genius" bar, where they identified the problem to be DOA (Defect on Assembly I suppose) and promptly replaced with a new one. They said since Macbook Air is a new machinery it takes some time for the assembling machines to settle and perfect the process. Anyways, I was glad they at least changed the unit before my return trip to India.

One thing that surprised me is that the Apple Store at Bellevue Square, WA being crowded all the time. During my three visits there every time I saw around 50 people in the store. This was the first time I am seeing a computer/electronics store in a mall crowded. I guess Apple has perfected the "Consumer" magic.

My corporate IT (Exchange Server) enforces security policy on all mobile devices that connect to it. So my phone is locked by a PIN. When I connect the Windows Mobile Phone (HTC S710) to PC, Vista displays a dialog box (like the one below). This dialog box certainly has useful information that needs my attention, but I am irritated on the fact it doesn't have a minimize/close button. Absolutely no way to get rid of the window other than keying the PIN in the device or disconnecting the device.

I feel this to be a classic case of bad user interface design.

One thing I hate about buying Electronics (Computer accessories as well) and Compact Discs (VCDs, DVDs) is the chore of cutting open the plastic packaging without hurting your fingers or the product. I just don't understand why the manufacturers want to put so much plastic on the covers with the idea of hurting you. If the idea is to protect (RFID tagging) from stealing and to have a frame for hanging/displaying then I am sure there are better ways. Ways that are environmentally friendly, more than environment friendly to the poor consumer who paid money. This is true especially for CDs that you buy from a Music chain (In India Music World, Landmark, etc.) where apart from the manufacturer cover the chains put RFID in a layer, then a layer of plastic to protect the RFID and so on., finally you end up having to cut open 3 layers before you can reach to the music. Similar pain for Electronic items, say a Mouse/Mobile Charger, etc. where you need a steady and 200 pound fingers to cut that thick layer of plastic before reaching to the product.  I guess the idea is to make it difficult for you to reach to the product, so that you cannot use it. Obviously a product still in the box, won't go bad and you won't call for support. Smart idea of electronics companies to save money especially with their margins dwindling all the time.

The next packaging item I hate is the sharp (metal) pins used in Shirts (Menswear). I can understand the idea is to have the shirt folds stay in place, so that the shirts while in the shelf have a nice look. Here again you have safer ways to do it like Paper Clips (Gem Clips). Apart from being dangerous to remove without hurting your fingers they in some cases damage the very shirt they are meant to enhance the appearance. Also these pins could be hazardous in countries like India where dump yards are often visited by Cattle's looking for food and scavengers looking for reusable items that could be sold.   

Finally, the packaging item I hate the most because I have to deal with it everyday is the Stapler Pins used in envelopes by courier companies. I am not sure whether anywhere else in the world, courier companies stapler the routing receipt with the envelopes they carry. Removing these Stapler Pins even by using the back of Stapler machine is tricky and most times you end up damaging the cheque or the document that is inside the envelope. Can't they paste it instead?.

Read the earlier part of this project here where I talked about the Digital Conversion of VCD/DVD and sharing in XBox.

After all the Proof of Concept, I decided it was time to go full time Digital. Bought new hardware for my house. One was a high-end desktop where I plan to do the conversions and regular PC usage. The second was for server role, where I had two 500GB HDD Mirrored for storing all my Digital Media files and sharing them. I then converted few dozen of VCD and DVDs into Nero AVC (MPEG4) format with the new desktop in few days.

I tried in the server machine, first Windows Home Server but that didn't the driver for Mirroring H/W that I had), then Windows Server 2003 but that didn't support installation of Zune Client Software, after that thought Windows XP SP2 will be the best but that didn't allow Zune sharing to be visible in XBOX whatever I tried. So I had to resort to Windows Vista SP1. Installed Media Center Extension that went through smoothly but my main requirement was to have Zune Network Sharing working so that all my Photos, Music & Videos are available for playback at my XBOX 360. These two articles have step by step instructions needed for a normal setup:

• How to configure the Zune software to share content from your Zune collection to an Xbox 360 console on a home network
• Listen to Music, View Pictures, and Watch Videos on your Xbox 360 Console

I had bought Norton 360 that contains Antivirus, Firewall and Antispyware. The firewall configuration was pathetic in Norton 360 so I switched it off and turned to Vista's default firewall. I installed and easily got SQUEEZEBox music sharing working. Zune Network Sharing was a big hurdle to cross, what ever I tried the videos and photos were not visible from XBOX. After several hours of trying I figured out the way to make it work.

1. Create a new user exclusive to run Zune Client Software, call it say "ZuneUser" make it administrator in Vista
2. Switch off User Access Control (UAC), this was the biggest problem cause
3. Reset all security settings for the drive/folders where you have your media files (Give Read/Execute for ZuneUser)
4. Go to Zune Client Software, configure your monitoring folders for media
5. Enable Network Sharing, give it a name and tick Music, Video & Photos
6. Go to Services Applet, replace the user account for the Zune Network Sharing (ZuneNSS) service from Network Service to ZuneUser.
7. Restart the ZuneNSS service
8. Give some time for monitoring job to pickup files
9. Go to XBOX 360 and look for your media files and play them

Nowadays, with the poor QoS of Telcos in India many users are forced to carry more than one phone. Some are doing it so that they can separate their personal and official calls. For me in all my years of having a mobile phone right from the first Motorola brick phone when a single call costed Rs.16 to now,  I never carried two mobiles at the same time. The first time I did that was this Tuesday when I travelled down to Delhi for a business meeting, and it turned to be a complete disaster. The idea of two connections (Vodafone & BSNL) was to tackle a problem I have been having in all Delhi trips in the last 12 months. Whenever I was in Delhi roaming from my Vodafone (Hutch) connection I couldn't dial a BSNL Landline (044) number, everything else works fine including CellOne numbers in Chennai.

After I landed in Delhi Airport I tried switching on one phone after other and both failed.

• First was my regular phone (HTC S710) which was continuously rebooting itself on the welcome screen with the only time it booted was when I removed the SIM card (so what good is a phone without a SIM card). 
• Second was Dopod 720W (a.k.a HTC S610) which showed up a dialog box saying something like "Repeated attempts to unlock failed, to ensure this was intended, Press A1B2C3". And as soon as I press the first key to do this, it popped up another dialog-box saying "Enter your device PIN to unlock and press done key". Interesting user experience of having one modal dialog-box over another on a device with no Stylus or ability to switch windows. Adding to my woes here, the done key was disabled. So even after I entering the correct PIN there was no way for me to press a disabled "Done" key. I wonder how this version of Windows Mobile 5.x software ever passed its test cases?.

I was left with a fully useless phone and a 50% working phone - with the Dopod 720W allowing me to receive calls only. No amount of reboots or anything worked with both phones.  That's when I realized how important Mobile phones have become for business productivity. I managed to complete two of my planned meetings earlier so I had ample time for a third but I couldn't schedule it or for that matter could not even call my cab driver from lounge. 

When I came back to Chennai Vishwak's mobile team gave me these options:

• For the HTCS710, do you have a micro SD, if yes, can you remove and then try.
• For both the phones to reset to manufacturer defaults, press 'power', 'left softkey', 'right softkey' simultaneously when the phone is powered down.

I tried both. For S710 the problem turned to be in the micro SD, once I removed it the device booted fine. The same Micro SD is working on a PC, so I am wondering can't a device on finding a problem with SD can't it just timeout and not load the module and proceed?. For Dopod 720W after resetting to manufacturers default, everything was working fine.

I am strongly tempted to throw my HTC devices out (I wonder why Microsoft is not investing on designing a good phone themselves), go out and buy my all time favourite - the rock solid, dependable Nokia Communicator in its new avator (E90). I am giving S710 one more chance as I don't want to waste my investment of Rs.16,500 in just 5 months. 

In the end, the moral turns out that you should have a simple, low-end Nokia phone  always as a backup with you for those moments when the smartphones behave stupidly. The phone should have minimum software, no GPRS, no Camera, just plain old Voice and SMS. And for me an old Nokia 2310 in the office fitted the bill fine. Wish me good luck with that.

I have a Nikon D80 camera and for best results I like to store the photos I take in Nikon's Raw file format (.NEF). The problem with this format is that very few programs know how to handle it correctly & fully.

Windows: If you want to view the files in Windows you need to install the plug-ins from Nikon, which installs the appropriate DLLs into Windows. With that in place you can open and view the files just like JPGs and GIFs in Windows Explorer. But in Windows Vista (Windows Photo Gallery or Live Photo Gallery) there is no option to convert the files from NEF to any other formats.

Adobe: At my laptop I use Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 and this has no plug-ins to open NEF (Nikon Raw) files, so I can't use the batch file conversion option of PS Elements. At my work PC I have Adobe Photoshop CS3 which supports opening of NEF format, but its batch conversion doesn't support conversion to JPG. I can't record a new action to do this, because in CS3 the RAW files are opened with a popup window (Camera Raw) which cannot be controlled through actions. I am able to convert individual files using Camera Raw of CS3 but batch conversion of multiple files (Nikon Raw files) at once doesn't seem to be possible with Adobe products out-of-box. 

Picasa: Google Picasa supports viewing of Nikon Raw files. Picasa also has the ability to convert the files to JPG while uploading it to Web. But it doesn't seem to have the option of converting a folder containing NEF files to JPG files and store them locally.

Irfanview: Finally, I turned to an old favourite of mine. Irfanview, this is a free software that allows viewing, editing of multiple file formats and supports slidesshow creation. I downloaded the base product and its plug-ins extension. With the plug-ins installed, Irfanview was able to open NEF files and using its batch conversion applet I was able to convert in seconds all my NEF files I had into JPEG files.

I got the first phase of my pilot program to have my house moved to Digital Media done. I thought the toughest part will be the purchase(choice), installation and wiring of the hardware but it turned out to be the easiest part. I got my SqueezeBox connected through wireless and playing audio (WMA/MP3) from my PC seamlessly, my XBOX 360 connected through Ethernet to my PC with the media shared using Windows Media Player 11/Zune Player Sharing. Windows Media Player (or equivalent Zune) sharing was much better and easier to setup and use than Windows Media Center especially since I didn't want Live TV through this setup at this phase.

I wanted the digital media files to be playable with my XBOX 360 and with Zune Player (so that I can watch/hear on the move). The toughest part was finding a software that will rip (copy) the media from the Video CDs and DVDs that I owned. This was the main motive behind buying the XBox 360, so that I can protect the CDs from my son scratching while trying to put it in the DVD player. Audio conversion from Audio CDs was easiest with Windows Media Player doing a great job in converting it to WMA or MP3 - both of the formats played well with XBOX & Zune. Video was the most difficult. First because of the DVD Copy Protection and then finding a reliable software for doing the copying to PC. 

DVD Copy protection

I don't understand this at all. Why should the Media houses treat me (a paying customer) like a criminal when all I want to do is to convert a legally bought content to a format that is convenient for me to store and watch. On top of this is stupid DVD Region code. When I am allowed to legally buy a DVD from any country I visit during my travel, why can't I watch it in my home DVD Player. Adding to the woe is the situation in India where DVDs are sold in both Region 2 and Region 5 codes with one not playing on the players with the other mark. An instance was the Inconvenient Truth DVD Indian Edition from Saregama that I bought recently was Region 2 whereas as per DVD Region Code chart it should have been Region 5 for India.  Because of these stupidness of the technology used, I have to rely on software that will overcome the protection and copy the media to the harddisk.

For this task I found DVD Decrypter (shown in right) to be the best. Don't waste your money by buying any of the software that claims to remove automatically the CSS copy protection. I have tried almost the top 15 software on the Internet and all of them are not worth the trouble and don't even come close to the reliability, quality and speed of free DVD Decrypter. Only challenge will be to find a reliable site to download the software since it is banned in few countries, Wikipedia and Google might help you on the search.  After using DVD Decrypter I am ready to the next step. Note: I tried softwares that claims to do both the removal of copy protection and ripping to MP4/WMV but they were produced output videos files that were pathetic quality and unfriendly to use.

Encoding Software

After downloading and trying nearly a dozen software from the Internet I finally settled down to Nero Recode. Almost all of them had one limitation or other. Remember I wanted the output to be played both in my Zune and XBox 360 not a easy combination.

• First was Windows Media Encoder did a reasonable job but was very slow and didn't work well with DVDs.
• Convert2Zune  - this was a free script from my fellow Regional Director Vinod Unny. This uses Windows Media Encoder as the backend and had the same drawbacks of that, except that it automated the steps.
• Next was Video VLC Media Player - this was the only reliable software that does both removal of CSS and encoding to WMV well, but the downside it was very slow in its conversion.
• PQDVD - I bought this based on recommendation from my industry colleagues to convert videos to Zune format. Though it initially seemed to work well with DVDs, I soon realized it was unreliable and pathetic for VideoCDs. 50% of the time it produced videos that had audio out of sync by several minutes!
• Nero Recode - Here comes Nero Recode. The software doesn't remove copy protection, but once you have crossed that bridge using DVD Decrypter there is no software that comes close to the speed and reliability of Nero Recode. Couple of points I learned that you need to be before you can start using it.
  • If you choose the profile as default Nero Digital Profile the output file doesn't work with Zune and XBOX. It produces MPEG4 files that uses proprietary Nero Digial Codecs that works only with Nero Digital Certified Media players - obviously Zune and XBOX are out of that. Initially I gave up Nero Recode because of this, but later learned the next point from a forum post.
  • You will have to choose the second profile in Nero Recode called "Nero Digital AVC" which produces industry standard MPEG4 files. The output files thus produced play natively with Zune Player. To make them play in XBOX 360, you need to do two things. First is to use Zune Player Sharing option over Windows Media Player Sharing. Second, go to XBOX 360 and play one of the files - it will automatically prompt to download an optional media update (below screenshot). Once you download and install it, your XBOX 360 can now play seamlessly the MPEG4 files.

Problem solved, case closed. Everyone lived happily ever after

I use a Windows Smartphone (HTC s710). Few weeks back while attending a professional presentation I took down some notes and saved it in the SMS "Draft" folder. Today I wanted the text available in  my PC so that I can use the contents, I didn't want to retype the whole text (it was few SMS messages long). SMSing to my same number won't work & Windows Smartphone OS doesn't have a copy-paste option - had it got that I could copied and pasted it as an email.

Finally I found a way, I have a PCMCIA Internet Data Card in my laptop from Tata Indicom. I sent the SMS to that number, then opened the data card software which showed all the SMS (as seen in the right hand side image) in a textbox, I copied it from there.

Isn't this a neat solution?. Only drawback was that I had to pay for 4-5 SMS messages though

Over the years I have tried with little success various models of Wireless input devices (Keyboard and Mouse), right from the early Logitech desktop sets. I see only one advantage of a wireless over the wired models is the convenience of giving it to the person on the other side of the table for a quick demo. Most of the wireless models anyway have wires for their base station and you need to keep the base station almost touching the keyboard for any good signal reception.

I am particular about ergonomics and I prefer keyboards that have a natural curve for hand comfort with a good play of the keyboard buttons as I type pretty fast. So when I saw the new "Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Desktop 7000" few months back it seemed to fit my bill - came with a small USB Dongle as a base station and had ergonomic styling. I got the desktop set few weeks back and been using it, but I found the keyboard to be unresponsive most of the times. I was using the native drivers that came with Vista x64 and didn't install the CD that came with the desktop set. As a try, I downloaded and installed the OEM drivers and software from Microsoft site and now it seems to be working perfectly well. The software also gives you additional tabs with customization features in the control panel applets. Download drivers for Windows Vista x64 from here.

One thing I keep wondering, why are the names for products from Microsoft always too long and confusing. Look at the names below, I guess only Microsoft marketing can come up with such creative inspiring names

• Microsoft Natural Wireless Ergonomic Keyboard 7000 (Natural Wireless - hmm, I didn't know all the other wireless technologies we used were all artificial)
• Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 7000 (the keyboard was Wireless Ergonomic, but the mouse is Wireless laser - does this mean the mouse is not ergonomic but only laser?)

In MSN today, I saw this article on PARADE Magazine picks its must-have technology for 2007. What I liked about this list was it was yet another list of Mobile Phones & Music Players. Not all of them were exciting, but I learned of few new interesting gadgets: Solar Charger for Cellphones, Biometric Door Lock that opens on fingerprints, HP Presto printer that does email without a PC, Ooma VoIP phone & Smartshopper that records your grocery list and prints it.

The article unfortunately doesn't have links to the product manufacturers so you had to Google for each of them.

Over the years, I have tried with different operating systems (Windows 3.1, 98, 2000, XP, Vista), newer & faster CPUs, different hardware brands (WinTV, Pinnacle, Aver), newer interfaces (PCI, USB) but I was never successful in getting a stable working setup of TV playing in a PC. At one point, it looked like I was having a curse against getting a TV Tuner working on my PC. In all cases my hardware exceeded the manufacturer's minimum required specification. So in the last two years, I have put TV Tuner in my list of technology "hypes" whose time haven't arrived yet.

With this background I tried again and I bought a Pinnacle Hybrid TV Tuner Kit (USB) for Vista during my Singapore trip. The minimum specification said Vista Home Premium/Ultimate (32bit) and it was Certified for Vista, this meant they have drivers for Vista. When I came back to my office, I tried to install it in my Windows Vista x64 Enterprise OS machine with 8GB RAM. I got the beta driver for Vista x64 from Pinnacle Support site, the card got installed but there was no Media Application to play the TV signal.

Windows Vista Enterprise x64 to Ultimate x64
After some search, I realized that I needed either Vista Home Premium or Ultimate because only those two Vista Editions include Windows Media Center that was needed to play the TV signal from Pinnacle tuner. I thought this should be simple, since Vista allows easy upgrade between editions, but it turns out officially you cannot upgrade Vista Enterprise to anything else. I found a hack here to do it, by tricking the setup to treat Enterprise as Business edition. Instead, I decided to reinstall Windows Vista. I did that and got Windows Vista x64 Ultimate working.

Pinnacle x64 Driver from Windows Update
When I now connected the TV Tuner USB Device, Windows Update detected the device, installed the correct driver for Pinnacle PCTV 330e and got initialised. I followed the instructions given in Pinnacle manual, connected the IR Blaster (this sticks in front of your set-top box and replays the IR instructions of set-top box remote) to IR Receiver and then the IR Receiver to a free USB port.
(IR Receiver / Remote sensor receives the signal from the Media Center remote control and relays it to the Media Center PC. When you plug the IR blaster/ control cable into the remote sensor and the set-top box, then the remote sensor also relays the signal from the PC to the set-top box)

Windows Media Center shows only TV Tuner as Signal source
I connected the Tata Sky DTH satellite set-top box's composite video/audio (RCA jack) output to Pinnacle Tuner. I ran Windows Media Center software, unfortunately it detected only the TV Tuner as an input source and refused to recognize the Satellite (Composite) as an available input source. Taking the suggestion from documentation for setting a set-top box from Microsoft site I ensured the IR blaster was connected. Still it didn't detect my composite video signal. For a strange reasoning best known only to Microsoft, Media Center doesn't enable input sources other than TV Tuner unless it detects the IR blaster. But in my case even with IR Blaster installed correctly, it didn't show up.

I tried the TV Tuner in two other Vista 32bit (x86) machines:

• Dell Vostro with 4GB RAM where I had the same problem of not being able to select composite signal source (Dell support said they don't support Media Center with Vostro series)
• Lenovo Desktop (with 1GB RAM) where it worked perfectly. Windows Media Center on first start, automatically detected the IR Blaster (allowed me to even control the Tata Sky set-top box successfully) and let me select composite as signal source.

It looks like Windows Media Center/Pinnacle Hybrid tuner doesn't support more than 1GB RAM for Satellite input. Strange!

I wrote to Pinnacle Support asking them on how to get the product working with Vista x64 Media Center. They said this is a MCE question so you should write to Microsoft. Filling a case with Microsoft PSS which they refused to take it as it is a how-to question and also it is a device capability issue. Writing back to Pinnacle, they promptly replied that the product is not supported in Vista x64 - "The tuner kit for Windows Media Center will only work on a 32 bit version. There is no update for a 64 bit version yet. We are sorry for any inconvenience the product has brought your".  This was surprising as Windows Update has a driver for the product and Pinnacle themselves have a beta driver.

So it was time to ditch Windows Media Center and do it on our own. After some research I found out Nero has a TV Tuner Player software - I am big fan and loyal user of Nero for years. I downloaded the trial of Nero 8 and after few configuration steps I got the device working.

Nero 8.0 configuration with Satellite Signal and Pinnacle Hybrid Tuner
The step to configure involves the following four steps:

Step 1: Launch Nero MediaHome software and then the "TV Wizard"

Step 2: "Pinnacle 330e/880e Device" as Video Device (you will see two entries, the other one is for TV Tuner Signal) and "Composite" as Video Input

Step 3: Launch Nero Home, select Video in Video and TV applet

Step 4: Scroll down and select Composite as the video to play

Finally, you will see this player with signal from Tata Sky working fine:

Note: If you are planning a TV Tuner card for Vista x64, before you buy it please visit the Microsoft HCL site to ensure you buy a hardware that is certified for x64.

My everyday work laptop is a lightweight Sony Vaio TX57GN around 1.25Kg, having a Core Solo CPU, 1.5GB RAM, 4200RPM HDD, Vista its speed is sub-optimal and I can only use it for email and browsing. Even then I am not complaining and actually I love it especially on my travels. This changes when I have to do demos (customer presentations or Microsoft events) I got to run multiple virtual machines and at that time CPU muscle, RAM and Speed are crucial. So few months back I decided to buy a second laptop for demos alone and eventually settled down on Dell Vostro 1400. That was the time (August '07) Dell had introduced Vostro series in USA, the price of USD 1740 (with taxes) for the configuration was attractive so I immediately purchased it and got it through one of my colleagues coming to India.

Dell Vostro 1400 configuration

• Vostro 1400, Intel Core 2 Duo T5470, 1.6GHz, 800Mhz FSB 2M L2 Cache
• 14.1 inch Wide Screen XGA LCD
• 4GB, DDR2, 667MHz
• Mobile Intel 965 Express Chipset
• Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
• 160GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
• Windows Vista Business    
• 24X COMBO CD-RW/DVD for Vostro
• Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g
• Warranty Support, 2 Year Extended

The laptop scores good on Vista Benchmarks and performs well with multiple VPCs and Vista Aero interface. Dell shipped the laptop (strangely) with Vista 32Bit OS, so it showed only 3.5GB of RAM. This week I decided to upgrade the machine to Vista x64, so I got it formatted and installed Vista Ultimate x64. Now the laptop shows 4GB RAM, but most of the devices (as expected) were not installed with drivers. Luckily Wi-Fi worked and after running Windows Update which download 150MB of 42+ updates and a reboot, most of the devices including Graphics card got installed. The Ethernet card proved tricky with no drivers available either from Microsoft's Windows Update or from Dell support site. Dell doesn't provide drivers for Windows x64 OS for any of the devices in their Vostro series Laptop. After some searching I found the driver from Broadcom's support site for the LAN card and now everything is working fine.

Download Vista x64 Ethernet Driver for Dell Vostro 1400 laptop from here.

I have started on a journey to centralize all my digital assets in a central computer (a.k.a server) in my house. The server will have all my digital photographs, music & video. The easiest of the three is to move my photos from my desktop to this server. Current plan is to stream audio to the music systems in the house, use XBox 360 Media Extender to stream video (DVDs) to the TVs in the house. I am considering using Windows Home Server for the central server. Though I planned it long time back only today I am finally started it, will keep you posted on how it goes.

The time consuming and manual process is to convert all my old audio cassettes into Audio files (MP3, WMA) and to convert all the DVD/CD into Video files (WMV, MPEG-4). This is the reason I was lazy to actually kick start the process. 

In this effort to have a fully digital archive, I bought Slim devices Squeezebox from Amazon to stream audio to music systems few months back. Only today I focussed and got it working. The device was extremely easy to configure both Wired and Wireless. The tough part was getting the SlimServer installed in the Windows PC and have the firewall opened correctly. These two articles were very useful: How to setup in Vista & Firewall Settings in Window. When I finally got the device working, I was surprised to see it showing Tamil (Unicode) characters. It didn't come correctly (as I guess it doesn't have full Indic Rendering support) but it showed Tamil Glyphs and we could guess the rest.

This week I got my System's team at Work to assemble a super fast PC for me. The Monster PC is loaded with:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Core Q6600 @2.40 GHz Processor
• ASUS P5w64WS Professional Mother Board
• 8GB RAM - Transcend 2GB DDR2 RAM x 4
• NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1GB PCI Express Card
• Western Digital 150GB 10000 RPM SATA Hard disk for OS
• Seagate 320GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard disk x 2 in Hardware Mirror/RAID 1 Config for Data
• ASUS 18x SATA DVD Combo
• Sony 18x SATA DVD Combo
• Sony Internal Memory card reader

The machine scored a very impressive Windows Experience Index of 5.5. According to Microsoft Website the maximum score now for a Vista PC is 5.9 and this machine scores for most of the items 5.9 and only for RAM 5.5. I am pretty pleased!

10/Sep/2007: I got myself pampered by adding to this machine, two wide 22" LCD monitors (ViewSonic Vx2235w). Each display does a resolution of 1680 x 1050 and I am loving the wide extended desktop.

I am not much into listening to music on the move. Most of the audio I listen happens in my car, office room or in my home office. So I use my Zune most of the time to show the pictures in the Living room TV to my parents using the Zune A/V cables. I tried to put Zune to better use by connecting it to a Car Kit and tune into FM from the Car stereo, but the reception was very bad. Lastly I thought the best use of Zune will be to listen to songs in my home office and retire my conventional CD/Cassette player.

So recently I got from Amazon - the Altec Lansing speaker set for Zune which includes an automatic charger for Zune. I am impressed with the voice quality and the remote is convenient too. I recommend this speakers if you have a Zune, unfortunately no Bose Speakers are yet out for Zune, but I am not missing it.

I am unashamed to say I am a fan of Nokia phones, especially the communicator series. For last 18 months I have been using Nokia 9300 which is  a fantastic phone. In between briefly I used Nokia Communicator 9500, when my 9300 was taken by our mobile team for testing. Both 9300 and 9500 (which is heavy) are great phones and if you are used to them its very difficult to move to another phone.

My experience with Windows Mobiles have not been pleasant (read this earlier post on Benq P50) so I am skeptical about buying one. Anyways, both my 9300, 9500 were taken away from me for testing, so I was left shopping for a new phone. I was tempted by Nokia E90 Communicator & E62 but I wanted to give Windows Mobile another chance. So hesitatingly for last few weeks I was using Dopod (HTC S620) borrowed from Vishwak's Mobile test lab. Being a Nokia user, I did encounter some nuisances with Windows Mobiles, but overall I got hooked to this phone. This is the first Windows Mobile that I had used which has a good battery life of few days without charge. Most items about the S620 phone were good - it was sleek and light, but it was difficult holding it during long calls and I don't like using Bluetooth headsets. Its keys were too small for my big fingers. So I wanted a clone of S620 but in smaller form factor convenient for single hand use. I am not a fan of PocketPC form factor, so I was not attracted to the new HTC Touch. So when it was time today to buy a new phone, I went with HTC's new SmartPhone - HTC S710. This runs Windows Mobile 6.0, Camera/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, mainly no stylus and a good spaced QWERTY keyboard that pops out when needed.

If you are a married Man you can't afford to forget your marriage anniversary & your wife's birthday. To prove that you remembered you need to have planned for it and present a good gift on the day. I honestly do believe that for the wife's the gift as material/money doesn't matter, but the thought is what counts for them (I have to say this as my wife reads my blog once in a while and you know...).

After few misses in the previous years, this time I went shopping few days in advance, bought the gift and hide it from her. On her Birthday I presented her a Nokia N76 multimedia phone.

Now coming to the geeky stuffs about the phone:

I know Nokia is known only for their candy-bar phones and only Motorola makes popular clamshell models. Reasons I went with N76 are two: 1) She earlier has a Nokia 6101, which she likes a lot and that is a clamshell model, 2) The choice was simple to make - Nokia has few models in clamshell and only one in N Series, I had already decided it will N Series b'cos of the multimedia features which she likes to have.

The phone is great when it comes to its technical specifications and has everything that you may want in a phone (even GPS can be enabled with a small add-on). I prefer Nokia had designed the phone a little smaller, lighter and ergonomic to open and close. The cool features are the Music Play buttons on top, Side ways camera usage, Dual colour screens, fast browsing, FlickR software to upload photos directly.

My only serious complaint is the choice of power connector and for four reasons:   

1) With Nokia phones I like that they all have a standard 3.5mm Power connector. You can go to anywhere in India and be certain the person(s) next to you will have a Nokia charger. In N76, they have their alternate smaller Power Connector.

2) This one I consider to be a serious user interface disaster Nokia designers have committed. Can you believe this?.
In N76 apart from the smaller Power Connector they do have a 3.5mm connector and that one is for AV (HeadPhones & Video). The manual warns you not to connect power to this AV Connector. Come on, who are you kidding here. I see a Nokia phone and it has a 3.5mm connector on top next to Power ON/OFF button I will certainly connect the standard Nokia charger.

3) The actual (smaller) power connector is in the right side of the phone. I don't understand how it can be convenient to keep it there for users.

4) The phone has a USB connector on top, so why will anyone on earth will want a seperate power connector apart from the USB one which can easily double-up I don't understand.

So my final verdict, if you love Multimedia phones and a die-hard fan of clam-shell models go for the phone. If not, please choose any of the other N Series phones.

This week, it was news everywhere in the technology world about Microsoft's new computer interface - Surface. It is basically a Coffee Table that doubles up as an interactive computer device that recognizes Multi-touch.

At first when I read the news about Microsoft Surface, I dismissed the idea as one more Fancy world imagination. After I saw the below video, the article from Popular Mechanics that went it and this video from 10.net, I was simply blown away.

I can image a day in the next decade when I might be struggling with one of these devices while my 4 Year son zips with it. It will be just like how today kids teach their parents on how to use Mouse and Keyboards.  

The entire UI for Surface I am told is done with WPF. Surface runs a customized version of Windows Vista, a rear projection screen and five cameras that look through the screen from behind to recognize and read items placed on the surface as well as to track hand gestures and touch. It has wired 10/100Mbit Ethernet and wireless 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth 2.0 support built in.

I am not predicting that this exact one from Microsoft will be the only one or that this interface will completely eliminate Keyboard and Mouses. But I certainly feel that something on these lines will be a big hit in next decade.

Last time when I was in Singapore I bought a cordless phone that double's up as a VoIP/Skype Phone as well. This is the new Philips VoIP321 that allows you to connect normal POT (Plain Old Telephone / RJ11) and a USB cable that connects to your PC. If you are logged in your PC and to Skype software, then you can use the cordless phone as a Skype Headset as well. It is so well designed that my grandpa can use it easily, all you do is press the S (Skype) button on left-bottom, select the name of the contact, press dial to call them. Simple!.

The voice quality is amazing. Good buy.

Read the FAQ here and the Vista Driver download from here.

Today I got my new car delivered - a "New Warm Silver" colour Honda City ZX GXi.

I have been planning for a new car to replace my Opel Corsa 1.4 GLS, for last 12 months after its warranty (1 year base and 2 years extended warranty) expired, but the interia of acting on it was too much for me to do anything. Personally I am not a Car "Lover" - car is more a utility to commute that's about it for me. 

Another reason for the wait was that my Opel Corsa was doing well. I had no complaints about the car, was extremely easy to drive and park in City conditions, size was compact and absolutely no problems. The only minus was mileage, which in the four years I owned, I could never cross more than 7Kms per litre. For strange reasons, GM discontinued the car in India a year or so back and started pushing their "Chevy" brand of cars instead. This meant spares for Corsa became sparse (or atleast thats what the market was talking) and the value for re-sale of the car diminished significantly. After taking a price quote from two used car dealers in Chennai including Sundaram Motors and Manipal, I sold to a relative of a friend. Even then I could manage to get less than 1/4 (one-fourth) of what I paid for the car exactly 4 years back - lower than the allowed income tax depreciation :-(. If there is a moral to this story - then don't think of Cars as investments anymore in India, second buy the popular moving brands and not a niche vehicle if you plan to resell it in few years.

For the new Honda City - I went with Loan from my favourite Bank "Bank of India". I managed to get the cheque with in the same day (my long banking relationship with them certainly helped in faster processing). That's what I call service. If you want to know why I didn't go with any other bank, read my earlier post on Housing loans here.

I have been seeing PCs from PC-AT days and the wish has always been to see the plethora of connectors behind your PC eliminated. With USB Headphones, I see no need for EP Jacks for Audio In/Out, but they still exist. Same like that no need for the legacy COM and LPT ports for printers and accessories. Though majority of the device can now be connected to USB, including Wireless Network (and there by eliminating RJ45 Socket) - the monitor has been stubborn on its VGA and Digital sockets.

Now Samsung's new Ubisync Monitor will hopefully say farewell to this. This monitor connects to any USB, needs no graphics card and works with Software Drivers. It supports connecting upto 6 monitors in one USB port. Cool...

I have in my house, a desktop PC with Intel 915G motherboard (little older than 2 years). Recently I upgraded to Windows Vista Home Premium. Vista detected and installed all the devices needed for basic functioning. Only two devices didn't work as they did in Windows XP SP2.

1) My HP Photosmart 2608, scanner and printer is working using Windows Vista default applets. The HP default scanning program doesn't get installed, HP still doesn't have a Vista compatible application (though their website announces coming soon). I am missing the HP application gives you convenient functionality like multi-page scanning, PDF format, etc.

(Update 10/April/2007: HP has released a new set of drivers for platforms including Vista and Vista 64 bit. The new application installation is faster than earlier and the new UI much more cleaner. Good thing HP took a little bit more time developing the new application. I still don't understand what their installation does for over 30 minutes)

2) When I wanted to input some Audio from my cassette player (yes, I still have it around) through Audio-In I couldn't. I checked and saw in Vista only see Mic-In Device, no Audio-In. After some searching, came across the new device driver for Vista from Realtek website. I downloaded and installed Vista Driver(32/64 bits) Driver only (R 1.63), everything is working fine once again.

My earlier post with Vista Beta 2 on the same machine

For few months my brother-in-law (BIL) has been asking me to help him shop for a digital camera that fits him. Finally early last month, we both could go out for it. I had done research on the web for the ideal camera for him:

• He is a first time Camera user, so the camera had to be price wise mid-range. Since he doesn't know his likings on a camera, this will keep his option open to buy a more sophisticated camera later
• Since this will be the only camera in his family, the camera has to be very easy to operate - especially his wife and his kid. So the camera has to be a point and Shoot - definitely a digital SLR is ruled out
• He has a computer at home, so he can download the photos after each shoot. So a high-megapixel camera shoudln't be a problem
• It has to have few minutes of video recording as well, since he doesn't have a Digicam seperately
• It has to be light-weight so that it is easier for them to carry around

I ruled out Nikon right at first since there point 'n' shoot models compare badly with Sony and others in terms of features for the price. I generally like Sony Cybershot for their ease of use, but found there new models focussing too much on smaller size than quality/stability.

I found an ideal camera in the form of Canon IXUS 850 in eBay India. The features impressive - 7.1 Megapixels, Compact Size, Standard SD Memory, Image Stabilization (very important for first time users) & Wide range optical zoom (which no other camera in this range had to this extend). Found good reviews in Cnet and DPReview. The eBay seller price was around Rs.20,500 and available from a Chennai Seller. Since I didn't know the seller I decided to go to Camera Citi in Radhakrishnan Salai and buy it -so that my BIL could feel the camera before buying. We got a good deal at Rs.21,000 with 3 years Camera Citi Warranty and a 1GB Memory card free.

The photos he has taken with the camera are impressive as well, he is very satisfied. I found the camera very good that I bought the next model IXUS 900IS for my wife during my Tokyo trip from Yodabashi Camera Store for Rs.17,751 (Yen 47,080) with Japan only warranty.

While comparing prices I found very little difference in the prices of these cameras between Chennai and Singapore. So it is better to always buy it in Chennai, so you get local warranty and save the hassles of carrying them from abroad.

While travelling, especially overseas Skype is very useful to keep in touch. At times, I pay for SkypeOut to make International phone calls and find their conferencing feature exceed expectations. The only requirement is for you to have a good broadband connection.

Anyways, for you to use Skype you need to carry apart from your laptop and mouse, additionally a headset. Recently while in Tokyo I bought this convenient device from Sony that combines a mouse and a Skype Phone (USB) for about Yen7500.

After carrying for years, fully loaded laptops I have come back to basics. My laptop for last 3 years was a HP Compaq nx7010, a 15.4" Wide Screen with 2GB RAM. In my many trips around the world and presentations the laptop has never let me down. I have seen rarely a blue screen, the cons are it is not a speed monster, wireless support is spotty and Vista doesn't support Aero glass. Battery life has been decent (90 - 120 mins) considering the wide screen and it has survived my numerous formats and re-installs.

My chief complaint has been weight - my hand-baggage on an average weighs 9.5Kgs. The major culprit being the nx7010 laptop weighing around 4Kgs - Laptop itself at 3.4Kgs and Power Adaptor the balance. I got so fed up carrying this brick block, I vowed a year back that my new laptop whenever I buy it will not weigh more than 2Kgs (including Power Adaptor). If you ask why wait for a year – simple, I wanted Vista to get released & come pre-loaded with the machine. Having lived through all major releases of Windows, I have learned not to buy a new laptop (Desktops are OK) before the preceding months of a major Windows Release. If you do, then be prepared to keep hunting drivers for its life. There are only few instances I know where people have successfully upgraded OS in their laptops. 

Last month I used every opportunity I got during my business trips in Seattle, Tokyo & Singapore to do extensive window-shopping for the lightest laptop. Then narrowed down to Sony Vaio TX Series (VGN-TX57GN) that weighs only 1.25Kgs. There are few Fujitsu, NEC, Panasonic and even a Sony G Series (890grams) that were available in Tokyo - but they all came only with Japanese OS and warranty limited to Japan - photos of these models for a different post. The model I bought was priced in Tokyo around 290,000 Yens, but I bought it last friday (2 Mar 07) in Chennai itself for Rs.112,500/- mainly for the convenience of support in India.

The VGN-TX57GN comes with a Carbon Fibre body that is extremely light. It is not a power-horse, has a Intel Core Solo 1.33Ghz CPU, 1.5 GB (max), 80GB HDD, 11.1” Wide Display, DVD Writer, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB, Firewire and Vista Business. Apart from the weight and the display brilliance, few more things impressed me with this laptop. The bundled software especially the Adobe PhotoShop and Premiere elements, Sony’s easy-to-use yet highly configurable recovery utility and the fingerprint sensor for sign-in. Full Specifications here (PDF).

I am setting up the laptop now – yet to load MS Office and other applications. So my actual experiences to be posted later.

Here is the scoope on I got my free Zune Player from Microsoft.

I never owned an iPod and my last brush with a MP3 player was about 6 to 7 years back with now ancient Creative Nomad II Player. Nomad had an extremely limited space even after adding 64MB Smart Media Card (which at that time costed me a fortune). I found limited use for the device, as anywhere I went I had my laptop - whether the trip was for business or vacation. So Music and Video was always there. I considered this as the perfect Digital Media Nirvana - with no need to buy myself an iPod or equivalent. In the mean time, I gifted my sisters with iPod Nano's and they were thrilled - which I couldn't understand why?

So when I got the Zune players (I got two - one I gifted right away) I was very skeptical on how useful will it be for me. Few weeks after I got Zune, I was to do my business visit to USA. Normally I rip few of the new DVDs and VCDs into my laptop - which in past trips, I hardly had time to watch and will delete on return with wasting the time spent in ripping them in the first place. This time I decided to give Zune a spin - so I was out looking on how to rip the videos to Zune format. After lot of research, trials and discussions with other RDs, I narrowed to "PQ DVD to Zune Video Converter Suite". The software certainly was fast, gave good quality video output and was worth the US$40 I spent on it. I just wish they have slightly a better User Interface and their website worked (now they seem to have a new website). If you are using this software, for better results with DVDs set the frame rate to 24 fps (in more options dialog) and Video Quality to Good (in main window).

I carried few Tamil Movies, Cho's Drama சாத்திரம் சொன்னதில்லை, EveryBody Loves Raymond and King of Queens. Zune was god sent when I had to kill my time in Airport waiting lounges and with British Airlines' boring In-Flight Entertainment selection. I just hope no one in London Airport thought I was crazy - when I was laughing funnily while watching King of Queens

Zune's battery was decent, I could get over 2 to 3 hours of video inspite of several pause-and-play situations. I just wish they improve it to last for few more hours to last for a full long flight. While in US, I bought Zune's Home A/V Kit - that consists of a AC Charger, Remote Control and TV Cable from Amazon for $75 against the full price of $99.  The TV Cable was really handy to connect Zune to a TV in the apartment and enjoy the videos I carried on a larger screen. I found the TV Cable to be useful at home as well for showing my parents the trip photographs from Zune.

If you own a Zune, I highly recommend the Home A/V kit for a complete experience. While on that, don't waste your money by buying the Zune FM Transmitter - I bought it as well and found it totally useless. The reception was bad everywhere - I am saying this after trying in the USA and also in Chennai where there is huge available non-used FM Spectrum, but still the signal strength was pathetic.

I am probably the first few in India to lay hands on a Zune Player. Last week I received a Zune Player - thanks to Microsoft RD Program and My Vista, My Office Challenge.

The first thing that strikes you is the package which is Simple, Compact & Clean. Definitely something I haven't seen before from Microsoft. There is no big logos or long instructions.  

The device itself is fabulous, well designed for day to day usage. The buttons are cleanly lay out, intitutive to use. The device sports Audio (WMA, MP3), Video (WMV) Playback, Radio Tuner, WiFi to share songs (which play on other device for 3 days/3 times) & Photo Slideshow.  The Audio & Video playback is flawless. Overall a serious competitor to Apple iPod.

The only thing I desire in Zune, is a better Desktop Software. For some reasons the software didn't install the necessary device drivers in my Home Windows XP SP2 PC, while it worked fine in my Office (WinXP SP2) machine. Hope Microsoft which makes great software like Windows Vista and Office 2007 comes out with a better Zune Desktop Software.

Update 20/12/06: There has been a new release of Zune Software yesterday that works with Windows Vista.

Today in Intel Developer Forum, I saw Intel Classmate PC. It is a small little Laptop for students. It runs on Celeron, 256MB, Wi-Fi, 1GB NAND Storage (no HDD), a fanless/noiseless desgin and Windows XP Embedded. I would love to have one to carry around rather than my big laptop. It is supposed to be available Q1 2007, for around < US$400 and for general consumer as well.  For educational institutions, they have a great classroom management software that allows teacher to see the screens of everyone in the class (thru' Wi-Fi), lock the laptops, etc. This S/W will be useful even in professional environments.

Update 10/5/2007: Intel seems to have started the piloting of these classmate PCs in India. I wish it good luck.

After weeks of suffering with Benq P50 and several hours of deliberations over the phone models - I have finally bought my new phone. It is "Nokia 9300i" at Rs.28,000/- with standard Nokia India Warranty. This phone though a little heavy compared to normal Nokia Phones has got a perfect form factor. This is the first phone where I could do with ease a meaningful SMS or a full email.

The phone has everything you wish for:
1) Qwerty keyboard inside and in outside a regular Nokia Mobile Numerical keypad - best of both worlds
2) Excellent full colour interface
3) Connectivity - GPRS, Edge, Wi-Fi
4) Great battery live even while using Edge browsing (or) Wi-Fi
5) Full XHTML/HTML Browser with JavaScript & Cookies support
6) POP3/SMTP/IMAP4 Email Support
7) MS Word/Excel/PowerPoint compatible Applications / Adobe Acrobat Reader

This is also the only Nokia phone for me that got recognized at first instance (just after installation of CD and connecting the USB cable) and the built in software synchronized all emails/contacts/tasks/notes from Outlook with ease.

There are only two things I miss in this phone - One it doesn't run Windows Mobile OS and two is a Camera. I guess I can live without both b'cos I am getting everything else!

I am also happy to be buying a Nokia phone last week, as it coincided with Nokia opening its first factory in India in Sriperumbudur (which is where I studied my graduate degree at SVCE ) near Chennai.

Recently I bought myself a Benq P50 (Read here the earlier post). After spending time to set everything up - ActiveSync, Contacts, etc. using it for few weeks, I realised the following:

• The phone is lovely, colors are brilliant
• Decent Browsing and usable Wi-Fi speed

• Phone is very heavy in your pocket, you got to use the belt clip to carry it
• The keyboard keys are too small - but you can get used to it after few weeks of usage. First few weeks, you will end up pressing two keys at once
• The documentation sucks big time. It leaves much to be desired. It is too shallow when it comes to First time user of Windows Mobile and is non-existent for advanced options
• The battery life is pathetic. So far the maximum I could get was 6 to 8 hours Standby with about average of 20 minutes talk time
• Radio is poor. Many times I see 5 full bars of network signal, but people get "Subscriber could not be reached" message
• The main usability problem was the phone doesn't have a Keypad Lock, so when I put the phone in the belt clip the dial key gets pressed accidentaly all the time and the phone dials the last dialed number - Kind of like Artificial intellegence. The workaround I found was to dial a non existing number like 4, each time before you place the phone in the clip. Pressing he space bar does bring the screensaver and locks the keypad but the dial key is still active and a small tap in the screen brings the keypad also active. After weeks of frustration I found out that you can gently press the power button once to put the phone in stand-by before keeping it in the clip which shuts down the screen, locks the dial key and all the other keypad keys. Too counter intutive.

So overall this phone is better to be left in the Shop Window; but with next version if BenQ fixes the above, upgrades the phone OS to Windows Mobile 5.0 then the phone has the potential to be a big hit.

I am now shopping for a new phone. I am considering Nokia 9300i, N70 and 6681. Last one week I had been using a friends' Nokia 9300 Communicator - seems to love the phone, especially the form factor, keyboard layout, email support. Though there are some nuisances like non existence of Vibrate mode, few quick shortcuts available in Series 60 phones especially with Address Book and SMS, the main features that are missing are Camera and Wi-Fi. I am awaiting for Nokia 9300i in India. If I get tired of waiting, i will go probably for Nokia 6681.

All this is not to say the Windows Mobile OS is bad, but the manufacturer (BenQ) seems to have got it all wrong in the device implementation. Proves the point that you shouldn't be the lab rat and wait for the few versions of a phone before buying it. I willl buy my next Windows Mobile only if it was made by one of the big manufactures like Palm or HP or better still Nokia

I am very happy to be welcoming "2006" with a new PDA Phone. Two days back I treated myself to a latest Windows Mobile, BenQ P50. As of now the phone is not available in India, so one of my friends from Singapore got it for me. It costed SG$1088.

This powerhorse has everything you want:

• Excellent Voice Capability
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, InfraRed, GPRS 
• 1.3 Megapixel Camera, photo editing software
• Word, Excel; PDF and PPT Viewer
• Java Manager
• Intel 416Mhz CPU, Windows Mobile 2003 Pocket PC Second Edition

I seem to like the phone so far, except for the battery life. Let me use it for more time and post detailed comments.

Many people in the IT Industry and beyond respect Nicholas Negroponte (chairman and co-founder of the MIT Media Laboratory) for his deep clarity on the power of "Bits" and "Digital" Technology. But for me, from the day I read his classic "Being Digital", I have been curious on what this genius is up to now.

Couple of years back, he announced his dream of a "One Laptop per child"; To make it true was the idea of a sub $100 laptop. Everyone in the industry (including me) doubted whether this was ever possible - with Intel brushing it away even now. But alas, last month in the Tuniasia World Summit he unveiled it and also selected Quanta (Taiwan based World's Largest Laptop Manufacturer) as the OEM. 

The plan is to distribute several million of these laptops to underprivileged childrens in China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand. The laptops will be Linux based, full-color LCD Display, 500MHz CPU, 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory, built-in wireless to find near by laptops ad-hoc. It will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. What I found as the most interesting feature was an innovative power - a manual wind-up (shown in yellow above). This is very important because the places it is being planned to be used are most backward areas where there is no power source and the laptop might even be the only light source during the night.

Using the laptops it is hoped that the children who before this couldn't even afford paper textbooks - will now have access to all materials that they need to complete their education. All this with little or no further costs being spent by the local governments, after the first US$100 (for the laptop itself). A noble cause, hope it works and eradicates illeteracy in the world.

Two weeks when I was in New Delhi, my meeting for the day got cancelled and I had few hours to burn; We (me and my friend Bala) were in Connaught Circle and after visiting Palika Bazaar and few other stores, I noticed a "Bose" Store. I have heard from my friends that Bose systems sound great and they equally cost a fortune to own. As an electronics graduate, Bose speakers have also amazed me on how they can engineer such audio brilliance into such small speakers. Recently one of my friend had also mentioned about the Bose Experience in their live theatre (inside every Bose store). So curious we went in and when we came out I should confess I was blown away.

The theatre experience (Free) itself was great - it is about 20 minutes on a self running Audio Visual; this definitely changes your outlook about Sound/Audio listening. The 20 minutes time spent was worth every second. You can listen to such small notes in there true colours. Next time you are near a Bose store, I recommend this. The other best part in a Bose store is their Sales Staff's service and explanation - each of them say the same about the systems, in the same order and with the same body language. This was true in their stores in other cities as well; I validated this in their Chennai Store, which I visited this week. Definitely very effective Staff Training!

Two systems impressed me the most - One was their high end LifeStyle 48 system that stores, plays Audio (CD/MP3/Radio) & Video (DVD/VCD), controlled with a 65-feet range Radio Remote that works across Walls/Ceilings/ Controls TV/VCR/DVD as well, suggest tracks as per your mood/listening pattern and of course includes the legendry Bose speakers; The other was their WAVE Audio Player with Radio. Though I certainly love to own the LifeStyle system, the price tag of Rs.2.5 Lakhs+ made me postpone the buy. Instead this week when I was back in Chennai, I went to their store in Ispani Centre, Nungambakkam High Road and bought the WAVE Player for Rs.33K. Since I had done all evaluation in their New Delhi store, I was in and out of the Chennai Store in like 10 minutes (Probably in Bose history the quickest sale ).

So for the last few days I am enjoying my WAVE Player thoroughly!.

Update 12/Jun/07: After nearly two years of buying this, I finally cracked on how to set the correct time in the device. It was too easy - just hold the Time +/- button(s) for few seconds, that's it. Courtesy to Bose Owners Guide page where I found this Manual (768.69 KB)for the device.

Apple mac mini Samsung 910MP 19" LCD

Last month while in United States, I ordered for a mac mini from the Internet. I ordered for the base config with 512MB RAM, 40GB plus Bluetooth module, Wireless Keyboard and Mouse - all put together came to abut US$700. First came the wireless keyboard and mouse package in 3 business days and a day later the machine itself arrived. That was pretty impressive delivery. I took it out and plugged to a monitor it simply worked. Wow!.  For long I wished to own a mac, to play with it and see how different or similar it is to Windows. In case of mac mini I simply wanted to own this lovely little box after seeing the image on Apple's site. I was impressed with its extremely small size and the engineering marvel of apple. It is amazing how Apple Engineers can put inside this small box - couple of chips, a hard disk, a dvd rom drive and still manage with heat that is being generated inside. Even in my HP Laptop, after few minutes of usage I could use the bottom to boil water.

The first thing I did was to download Windows Media Player for mac so that I can listen to my WMA songs, following that I downloaded Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) for mac. With RDC I could connect to my Windows Laptop and still do my emails.

The things I loved after few hours were Mac 10.x (Tiger)'s beautiful aqua user interface and animations. Followed by that was the crisp interface especially the text clarity (to some extend thanks to my 8ms Samsung 19" LCD). I simply couldn't help myself admiring the sharpness of Tamil Texts in Unicode pages using Safari browser. The audio was brilliant. Safari's RSS reading was equally good. The machine came with Office 2004 for mac 30 days trial pack installed. Word sports an interesting UI in this release for mac, cool. The best feature for me was the bundling of Murasu Anjal for Tamil Fonts and Tamil Keyboard. Because of Murasu bundled in, I could go to any latest Mac apps and start typing in Tamil. Unfortunately Office X for mac and Appleworks 6.0 don't support this new Input/Display methods. PowerPoint 2004 & Textedit supported this flawlessly. The experience of connecting my digital camera and importing photos was simply painless. Good work Apple.

Things I didn't like: I was not that impressed with the Safari browser page rendering speed. Even after trying for an hour or so, I couldn't enter this blog from my apple. I tried first with Safari, then with Camino, then with Internet Explorer for mac. The issue was none of them had my Dasblog entry screen which uses FreeTextbox to appear correctly. So I am doing this post from my trusted Windows XP.

In Remote Desktop I figured how to do Right Click - later configured to use the Alt key with mouse click as Right-Click. I am still unable to select multiple songs or create a playlist in Windows Media Player for mac.

My years of waiting for a good Smartphone running Microsoft Windows OS is finally over. Till now MS Smartphones were lacking behind Nokia Phones in terms of ease of handling and convenience; they were mediocre port of Desktop Windows.

In the last two years, after trying many of the new phones launched in India by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, PocketPCs, I was more than convinced that as a Nokia user, it will be impossible for me to move to any other phone, other than a Nokia.  All this became thing of the past, with the launch of O2 XPhone II. Last week, I bought my own from Funan IT Mall, Singapore for SG$789 (INR 21300).

As you can see above the XPhone II is a black beauty. It is small, compact, weighs light and fits in your hand conveniently. It comes with a cute little belt holder that makes carrying the phone a breeze. The phone responds swiftly to all the commands thanks to TI's powerful OMAP730 single chip that powers it. The XPhoneII features Bluetooth, USB, Infrared, HTML/WAP browsing, MSN Messenger, Pocket Outlook, VGA Camera, Polyphonic Ringtones, Speakerphone, Conference, MMS, Windows Media and more...

What I personally like about the phone is the brilliant colour display, its excellent reception and voice quality (after all a phone should work the best for speaking and hearing, isn't it?)

We all are used to the convenience of Mobile phones. I love my Nokia 6610 due to its small size and less weight. Added reason is my son's photo seen well thanks to the great color display. I am eagerly looking forward to switch to a good versatile Microsoft Smartphone soon. This will give me the ability to write custom programs in .NET, do PowerPoint or Excel or Outlook on the move without needing a Laptop.

So we all love buying new mobile phones every other year or 2 years once. We don't think much about this, because of the rate of obscelence and the free price fall of new models. But there is a other dark side to this.

Environmentalists around the world are now very concerned about this trend. As this PTI article says there are going to be over 130 Millions mobile phones thrown by Americans alone next year. Extend this to rest of the world, you can understand this fully. Dumping them in landfills or sea dumps is going to create this big environment problem, mainly due to their toxic content, mainly lead discharge.

So the next time I am buying a new phone, I am not throwing my old one. I will hand-it over to a low-end user!